Scheduling your life can help relieve anxiety.
For many, balancing a clear set of life goals with the freedom for spontaneity is the key to living an enjoyable, successful life. Scheduling your life should therefore account for everything you wish to accomplish, but also leave room for any opportunities you may discover along the way. Creating such a schedule can help relieve stress by emphasizing that you are who controls your life.
Instructions
1. Create a list of long-term goals you wish to achieve in your life. These can range from career-oriented goals, social goals or simply personal accomplishments. For example, your life goals may include items such as "Become a professional lawyer," "Raise a family," "Travel to Asia," or "Run a marathon."
2. Write down the steps you need to take in order to achieve the goals on your long-term goals list. For example, for "run a marathon," you may write down, "Sign up for the November 2012 Seattle Marathon. Start training program on August 1st."
3. Transfer the steps you've written down for each long-term goal into a weekly planner. For goals that do not have a clear structure, such as "improve my relationship with my mother," write down an action you can take toward achieving the goal once every week. For example, on every Sunday of every week you could write "call Mom."
Since weekly planners usually only cover a year, some of your more long-term goals may not need to be entered in yet. For example, if one of your goals is "raise a family" but you don't plan to do so for another five years, it does not need to be written in your weekly planner yet. Keep those goals in mind, but don't let the thought of them cause you anxiety. Focus on how much time you have before you have to get to work on those far-off goals.
4. Enter the other aspects of your weekly routine into the planner only after you have accounted for your long-term goals. This way you ensure that the everyday, somewhat banal tasks you encounter at work or at home do not interfere with your overall life plan.
Tags: your life, long-term goals, every week, example your, help relieve, life goals